I have realized, in the years since I started making wine in 1975, that this clinical approach to wine tasting can deliver a detailed analysis of different wines, complete with numerical scales against which they can be compared, but it bears almost no relationship to how real people drink wine.

When you experience a wine, you incorporate so much more than the wine itself into your appreciation that the analytical part is overshadowed and becomes much less important.

Can you remember sitting, glass in hand, under the arbor one night, candle's glow bouncing off your companion's face outlined against the night, talking about whatever of life's intimacies you bounced into as your conversation drifted? Or perhaps you sat on your broad front porch or beside a dying campfire at the beach or at a wonderful restaurant talking and drinking wine, savoring the moment often without even being conscious about doing it.

Those wines, the ones I shared with special people, are the ones I remember with far greater fondness and clarity than any I have rated professionally with numbered samples lined up on a white table, notebook and pencil at hand.

So remember the next time you hear someone say, "The most incredible bottle of wine I have ever had